Wild Young Hearts (2009)/The Noisettes.

I missed a chance to see the Noisettes my first year of college. I wasn’t planning on spending seventeen bucks for a TV On The Radio concert with a bunch of drunk kids. So instead Zach and I babysat a friend’s prospective student, and drank wine coolers on the stoop of the dorm. All and all I think I still came out ahead, because I didn’t buy the wine coolers. When our friend returned to take care of her charge she told us about this band that performed called the Noisettes. I listened to a few songs, and thought they were ok. If you haven’t heard their first album, What’s the Time Mr. Wolf?, than please imagine a toned down Betty Davis with all the funk punched out of her. Then imagine some fairly generic rock music. You have the Noisettes, or, should I say, had the Noisettes.

Wild Young Hearts is the soundtrack for a very specific moment that occurs in most people’s lives, or at least mine. Around the same time that I was babysitting that prospie while my friend rocked out to the Noisettes, I had just ended a very complicated, and short lived romantic/sexual entanglement with a young woman. We had been hooking up for around a week and a half, and she ended things because apparently I was getting too attached, because I wanted to be friends and hook up buddies. The point is Wild Young Hearts would have been the soundtrack to that particular moment of my life. That moment when instead of missing a former significant other/fuck buddy you reach for the phone to call them out of habit, not because you miss them, but because you miss making out to Sigur Ros on a dorm bunkbed. Basically you’re bored and don’t know how to be alone. Wild Young Hearts captures this specific ennui perfectly.

Unfortunately for the Noisettes capturing boredom, and then making it exciting is hard to do. This is the Caffeine-Free Diet Coke version of a rock album; technically it’s still Coke, but really– come on. The problem is, the same people that drink Caffeine-Free Diet Coke more than once (I wasn’t paying attention) are the same ones who would like this album more than once, and find it exciting every time. This may have been an attempt at branching out, but it might be that the Noisettes need more time to set their rock roots first. As it is this Wild Young Hearts sounds like a Morcheeba tribute band released a studio album after being dumped, and bored as shit.

Young Wild Hearts (Mercury 2009) The Noisettes